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sophiareads_'s review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Diverse cast of characters? No
1.0
Content Warnings: war, violence, death, gun violence, violence against children, death of a parent, Nazism (mentioned)
During the Blitz, Hamish is evacuated to a small town in the English countryside, where he and the daughter of his evacuee family, Penny, meet the mystical Briarmen who live in the woods beyond the railway. When rumours spread of a German plane crashing into the woods, however, their secret is in jeopardy.
Unfortunately, this was a really tough read for me. I found the writing style so distracting that I just couldn't get into the story - which is a shame because for the most part I thought the story was pretty good and well paced, if nothing groundbreaking. There were one too many errors with missing punctuation throughout, which is a MAJOR pet peeve of mine and just continuously took me out of the story.
I really think this book would have benefitted from a harsher editor - the writing is very clunky and sentences are meandering. I definitely got that 'essay trying desperately to reach the word count' vibe from it, which really doesn't lend anything to the story. There was a real issue with 'tell' not 'show' here, with everything being so explicitly spelled out for the reader. Trust us to read between the lines! We can pick up on foreshadowing without you having to explicitly remind us of it when the reveal comes!
Also, while I appreciate the idea of exploring the nuances of the ordinary soldier by making the German pilot one of the heroes of the story, I don't think this was particularly well executed. Yeah, he's nice to some white English kids, but if you want me to root for a German soldier in WW2, I need SOME kind of assurance that he doesn't believe in Nazi ideology, and I did not get that.
I liked the idea of this story, but I'm afraid I would have DNFed this if I wasn't reading to review.
Thanks to Crescent Swan for sending me a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, War, Death, and Gun violence
Moderate: Death of parent
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